He then carried her out to the balcony and "unloaded" her over the edge.

This was Ms Harnum's punishment for making one final, desperate attempt to leave her controlling, dominating boyfriend.

For weeks she had been planning to go, leaving bags of clothes with her personal trainer and a counsellor so that Gittany's suspicions would not be aroused, and discussing one-way flights back to Canada with her mother.

When Gittany discovered the plan, he was consumed by rage.

"For all his vigilance, his errant fiancee had found a way to secretly remove her belongings," Justice McCallum said.

Virtually from the start of his relationship with Ms Harnum, Gittany exhibited a burning need to control virtually every aspect of her life - how she dressed, where she went and how she behaved.

When police arrived at the murder scene on the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth streets, they found a torn-up note in the woman's jeans pocket with the words "there are surveillance cameras inside and outside the house" scrawled in her distinctive handwriting.

This was a reference to the near-constant surveillance Gittany kept his girlfriend under, including monitoring her text messages through a program he had secretly installed on her phone and a bristle of CCTV cameras monitoring the apartment.

During the sentencing process the Crown prosecutor, Mark Tedeschi, QC, described the murder as "cold and calculating", submitting that that it warranted a minimum sentence of 20 years in jail.

The defence argued that the sentence should be "significantly less" than 20 years.